Texas Rangers Offense Has Been Historically Efficient And Pretty Lucky

The Texas Rangers have been one of the biggest stories of the 2023 season, but have largely flown under the radar due to the even more eye-catching exploits of the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rangers sit at 40-21, in 1st place in the AL West, with much of the attention going to their revamped starting rotation that was to be led by the injured Jacob deGrom.

Sure their investment in deGrom has gone sour, but smaller but still sizeable investments in Martin Perez, Jon Gray, Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney have paid off handsomely to date. An overlooked aspect of the Rangers’ excellence is their offense. The club has scored 386 runs in their first 61 games through Wednesday (when they were shut out by the Cardinals). This ranks 1st in the majors by 18 runs over the Rays.

Is that exorbitant number of runs due purely to slugging? While the Rangers’ total of 79 homers is solid, the Rays have hit 107, the Dodgers 106, the Braves 100, the Yankees 96 and the Angels and Cardinals 85. (Yup, the Cardinals.) While the Rangers have a fine .458 team SLG, that only ranks 4th in the majors behind the Rays (.476), Braves (.464) and Dodgers (.461).

We have to keep searching for what sets the Rangers apart. Our first finding is in that tried and true statistic that we’ve been told is utterly meaningless – batting average. The Rangers are leading MLB in batting average by an incredibly wide margin of .013. They rank first at .277, way ahead of the Blue Jays and the – wait, the Cardinals again? – at .264.

So that tells us something – eight of the Rangers’ regulars are batting .272 or better. Corey Seager (.336), Ezequiel Duran (.322), Marcus Semien (.299), Leody Taveras (.295), Josh Jung (.293), Jonah Heim (.286), Nathaniel Lowe (.279) and Adolis Garcia (.272) all are hitting for average, and all have at least some pop – the lowest SLG among them is Taveras’ .434.

So this tells us why they’re a good offensive club, but it doesn’t tell us why they’ve been great, outscoring teams with truly loaded offenses by a substantial margin.

795 Rangers have reached base via hit or walk this season; the Rangers have scored 386 runs. The club has posted a 48.55% baserunner scoring percentage thus far this season. (No, I don’t include HBPs, and they’re not the reason for the Rangers’ excellence – they’re 10th in the AL in that category.)

This percentage is BY FAR THE HIGHEST IN MODERN BASEBALL HISTORY. The record-holder is currently the 1901 Philadelphia Athletics at 47.08%. 6 of the Top 20 marks of all time were posted in 1901, when tons of runners reached via errors, which I also exclude from the calculation. So the “real” leader is the 2020 Dodgers at 46.47%. But that’s the pandemic-shortened season, so let’s throw them out along with the #4 2020 Padres (45.77%). Our new leader is the 2019 Yankees at 45.73%. There’s a huge gulf between where the Rangers stand now and the next highest scoring percentage in the modern era.

The top 20 in this category is full of early 20th century clubs, 1930-era offensive anomalies, the 1996 Rockies, 2000 White Sox and 2019 Yankees and Twins. Yes, fewer plays are being scored as errors, more homers are being hit, factors that are resulting in more modern teams rising to the top of this list. This season’s rule changes, including the pitch clock, shift and pickoff throw limitations and bigger bases all nudge things in this direction as well. This season’s Rays (46.64%) and Dodgers (45.16%) would also rank in the all-time score percentage Top 20. But both are substantially more powerful teams than the Rangers, and should be scoring a higher percentage of their runners. What sets Texas apart?

Some things that simply cannot hold up over the rest of the season:

The Texas Rangers are batting .335-.384-.550 with runners in scoring position.

The Texas Rangers are batting .305-.377-.498 with runners in scoring position and two outs.

The Texas Rangers are batting .385-.383-.769 with the bases loaded.

This is incredible. We’ve now played just over the equivalent of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic-shortened season, and the Rangers are still running historic situational numbers.

Historically, a team with a .458 SLG can be expected to score just over 41% of its baserunners. The Rangers are scoring 48.55% of theirs. The 2019 Yankees – the legitimate standard-bearer in this category at 45.73% – had a team SLG of .490, 32 points higher. The Rangers are scoring all of these runs in large part due to impossible, unsustainable performance in clutch situations.

This is a good Texas ballclub – they were a sleeper for me coming into the season, but even I am shocked by how well they’ve played. deGrom has predictably gone down, but a bunch of other arguably just-as-risky pitchers have excelled, while a good offense has hit at about its upper limit – with timeliness that is off of the charts, to say the least.

There is no way the Rangers can keep this up and maintain a 105-win pace. But they don’t have to – these 40 wins are in the bank. Even .500 baseball the rest of the way gets these guys into the playoffs, and they’re likely to do a bit better than that.